Blow
Page 23
What George needed to hide his growing mound of money in was a house, and it had to be back on the Cape, away from the Colombians and the frazzling life in Miami. Betsy’s house was no longer available, their romance having fallen victim to George’s newfound reliance on the escort services. He’d dropped by to break it off with her during a trip north in early July. Finding her out, he’d left a note on the kitchen table along with twenty thousand dollars in cash and the keys to his Thunderbird, packed his clothes and left. As a location for his own stash house, he looked in the town of Wellfleet, toward the end of the Cape and not as crowded as Hyannis. He told the real estate lady he wanted something on the water, with hot-air heat, if possible; it helped his sinuses.
The place she found was a large three-story cottage with weathered shingles and a big screened-in porch overlooking Cape Cod Bay. He hired his man Courtney, the welder by trade, regularly to courier the cash up from Miami and to construct additional heating ducts to nowhere in the basement at Wellfleet as a repository for the cash. George came up once or twice to check on things and transfer some of his pile to the Rockland Trust Company in Weymouth, where he got his father to cosign for a couple of safe-deposit boxes—the big ones, with the large drawers. By now, Fred had decided not to ask any questions about his son’s financial success.
With his money safe, at least temporarily, George threw himself back into the plane trips and the preparations for Barry Kane’s first run. So preoccupied was he in these matters that when a letter arrived from Jo-Anne Carr, forwarded to him by his mother, it came as a small shock for him to realize that he was still, despite it all, on parole. In recent months, his obligation to report on his activities had been reduced to sending in a monthly form attesting to the fact that he still resided at Abigail Adams Circle and was still employed in the fishing business, earning an income George put down as three hundred dollars a week. No foreign travel, no associating with people who had criminal backgrounds, no taking drugs. In her letter, Jo-Anne praised him for his successful effort at staying out of trouble and his commendable progress toward rehabilitating himself, in consideration of which she had therefore recommended releasing him from his parole obligations ahead of schedule. All the best, she said, for a happy and prosperous future.
Somewhere around this time George suffered a serious lapse in judgment and decided to introduce Carlos to Richard after all. Carlos’s insistence that the meeting take place had eventually worn George down. Carlos had argued that since he had introduced George to everyone he knew, he now had a right to meet this guy. And if George refused to tell him Richard’s name, this must mean he didn’t trust him, and if that was the case, how could Carlos continue to trust George? George liked to say they were brothers, didn’t he? Was this acting brotherly? He badgered George constantly. In addition, George’s coke intake had escalated to the point where it was seriously clouding his judgment. He was up to four and five grams a day during the trips to and from L.A., whereas the pharmacology textbooks commonly put the toxicity level for normal people at 1.4 grams. Finally, there was the money: There was just so much of it lying around, what possible difference could it make whether he introduced them or not? In two years, George figured, he’d have $50 million dollars and get out of the business for good, convert some of his fantasies into reality. “Even if it wasn’t $50 million, if it was only $20 million cash, you can do anything you want the rest of your life, put it into securities, make 12 or 15 percent interest. When you’ve got that kind of cash, they’ll give you that kind of interest. At that time Mexico was giving in bonds something like 18 percent. Or the Mediterranean. This was not a vague plan of mine. I was going to do this thing with Carlos for a year or two, and I was getting out, because I didn’t want to go back to jail, because I knew if you played this game, there were only two results—jail or death. So it was the motor sailer and be happy and drink the best wines and eat cheese and gamble in Monte Carlo, go to Hong Kong. Not in my wildest dreams did I think he would stab me in the back.”
The occasion for the introduction was a party in late July in the upper-middle-class community of Palos Verdes, at a sprawling house rented by Nick Hunter, an electronics-store owner and one of Richard’s major dealers. There was a pool out back. Guests included the usual mix of rock artists and movie people, a lot of Hunter’s high-end customers. About a pound of cocaine was piled up on a mirror sitting on a coffee table in the living room, there for the taking. Topless women were serving the drinks and bands were spelling each other so no one would have to endure more than a minute or so free of rock and roll. George was staying at the Castle with Richard that weekend, and he had invited Carlos to fly out for the party. After all the build-up, the meeting itself proved anticlimactic. George went with Richard to pick Carlos up at the airport. The two shook hands, and that was about it. Indeed, they seemed a little awkward with each other. Richard offered Carlos a snort, and to George’s surprise Carlos took it. But whereas it usually brought people out of themselves, the coke only made Carlos seem quieter and more withdrawn. At the party, George noticed that Carlos talked mostly to the host, Nick Hunter, while sipping his mineral water. A crowd gathered around this exotic foreigner, but Carlos seemed pained by the attention. A couple of hours later he went back to his hotel and the next day returned to Miami.
EIGHT
Norman Cay
1978
I said, “Carlos, I hope you never betray me.” He said he never would. And he almost started to cry.
—GEORGE JUNG
IN THE CRUISING GUIDE TO THE BAHAMAS, YACHTSMEN desirous of putting into Norman Cay for the night are warned that during certain months of the year, if you anchor in the large protected lagoon at the northern end of the island, it’s not a great idea to dive in for a swim before lunch because you might get seriously eaten by a hammerhead shark. The sharks are born in the lagoon and return there every year to fulfill their instinct to copulate and perpetuate the species. Whether drawn by a fondly recalled feature of the place or reacting to a compass in their brains that homes in on some magnetic force in the bedrock underneath the island, as scientists more commonly believe, they leave the lagoon as small fry and reappear when they’re ten feet long and in such numbers as to blacken the waters with their presence. Hammerheads aside, in all the other categories Norman Cay rates as being as close to paradise as any of the other seven hundred islands that make up the Bahamas. Shaped in the form of a giant fishhook, with the barbed end curving around the shark lagoon and the shank consisting of a blindingly white beach a little over four miles long, the island lies at the head of the Exuma chain, an easy day’s sail southeast of Nassau. Sparsely populated, Norman Cay possesses a harbor famous throughout the Bahamas for providing a haven from sudden tropical storms. A virgin coral reef eleven miles long and filled with tropical fish and wondrous underwater vegetation is situated just offshore. Out beyond the reef is the Exuma Sound, a thousand-foot-deep trench in the ocean that produces some of the best big-game fishing in the Caribbean.
In the 1960s, hoping to exploit its commercial potential, a land developer from Ohio constructed a modest twelve-unit hotel and restaurant there, along with a three-thousand-foot airstrip and a marina with an L-shaped dock. The venture languished after the Bahamas gained its independence from Great Britain and investors became jittery over what sort of business climate would be fostered by the new, all-black government. The island was then sold to a group of New York and Canadian businessmen, who by the late 1970s were still looking for someone to sink big money into the place.
In addition to sharks, Norman Cay has provided a refuge over the years for marine denizens of another variety, namely smugglers and sea pirates. It was named for a minor English pirate, and in the seventeenth century, it served Blackbeard and Henry Morgan as a launching point for their plundering. In the 1920s it was used as a way station for bootleggers running rum from the West Indies to the Florida coast, which lies 210 miles away, barely an hour’s trip by airplane. There’s
no customs post on the island, or police presence of any kind. At night and in bad weather, airplanes can find the landing strip at Norman by locking on to the powerful radio beacon at Nassau International Airport, just twenty minutes away. And during the period in question there was the powerful advantage of what was referred to euphemistically as “the Bahamian way of life.” Loosely translated, this meant that under the government of Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling just about anything you might conceivably want in the Bahamas was up for sale, be it the courtesy of ample warning should the national police, for form’s sake, decide to conduct a raid on your premises, or protection from any interference in your privately constituted affairs by any representative of a foreign power, especially including agents of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration.
The hospitality of the Bahamian government in regard to the drug business had been widely known among smugglers since the late 1960s, which was why during the summer of 1977, while George was doing the red-eye runs to the West Coast, Carlos Lehder had gone out scouting the region to find the kind of island empire he’d dreamed about ever since Danbury. On Norman Cay he immediately began negotiations with its corporate owners to buy a large amount of acreage on the southern end, which included the hotel, the airstrip, and the marina, with the stated object of developing the property. Carlos told them how he’d like to extend the airstrip a thousand feet or so, dredge the harbor, and expand the hotel, maybe also build a gambling casino. All this appealed to the owners, since they intended to retain a few building lots, which couldn’t help but appreciate should Norman become a resort.
What Carlos neglected to tell them, of course, was that attracting tourists wasn’t what he had in mind. As he related to George, the deeper docking facilities could be used for landing freighters—vessels with real carrying capacity, their holds fairly bursting with duffel bags of cocaine. From the dock he’d move the coke to airplane hangars he intended to construct along the runway, and fly it out on cargo planes, up to the DC-3s he could bring in once the airstrip had been extended. The hotel would be outfitted to house the kind of staff you’d need to keep a place like this humming—people to unload the ships, load up the planes, and keep everyone fed, entertained, and stimulated.
In the eyes of people back in Medellín, Carlos had by now proved his worth. Thanks largely to George’s series of runs to the West Coast, the processors had convinced themselves Carlos was the man with the right ideas and the right contacts, the one who could put the cocaine business on the track toward achieving its ultimate market potential. This was no piddling 100- or 200-kilo operation he envisioned anymore. Carlos was talking jumbo loads: 500 kilos at a time, 750 kilos, 1,000 kilos at a time now—more than a ton of 100 percent pure product going in and out on each trip, with a trip a week or more. He was planning to have a veritable blizzard of blow—billions and billions of dollars’ worth—headed toward the United States. Look, he told George, they’d always talked about cranking this thing up, right? Well, now he was ready to launch their little operation into stellar orbit.
“He was totally obsessed with this island thing and owning it and having an empire,” says George. “It was all he could talk about, he wouldn’t listen to anything else. And we started to have big fights about it. I basically thought it was ridiculous to do this. Even if he could buy off officials in the Bahamas, to entrench himself and fight the governments of the world, saying ‘Here I am, I’ve got my own little island. Fuck everybody, this is my drug-transport business, come and get me.’ I told him, ‘Are you shittin’ me? If the United States government finds out who you are and where you are and you’re breaking the law, I mean, we took down Japan, Germany, and Italy. You don’t think they can’t take down Carlos Lehder on Norman Cay?’”
George tried to bring Carlos back to the original plan they’d talked about back at Danbury: bringing the loads across the border through different access points, some through Mexico into California, others into Louisiana, Florida, and other southern states. “The islands were fine, but my plan was to keep moving, keep changing, be secretive, be light on our feet. Nobody knows what you’re doing or where you are or who you are, and as long as they don’t know who you are, they can’t get you.” In conversations about their business, George and Carlos had already begun referring to themselves as “the company,” which they thought of as also including Humberto, this Pablo Escobar down in Medellín, whom George hadn’t met yet, Barry Kane, and a few others. “It wasn’t called the ‘Cartel’ then, it was la compañía,” says George. “My job was to get the pilots and the planes and arrange the landings and be like the vice-president of the American end of things. Carlos would handle the liaison in Colombia, arrange for the shipments. That was the original concept.”
Trying to rein in Carlos after he settled on Norman Cay, though, was like trying to keep a horse in check with a piece of string. In conversations with George, he was soon beyond Norman and into more expansive schemes, much grander designs of what he could do with the cocaine profits. “‘Money is power,’ he said, and he was going to have an unlimited amount of money,” George recalls. “He wanted to use it to liberate the people of Colombia. He said that something like 87 percent of all the arable land was owned by 12 percent of the people. You had women sitting on church steps purposely crippling their own children to make them sympathetic beggars. He wanted to take over the country and give the people back their land. I asked him if he’d ever seen the movie The Adventurers, based on the Harold Robbins novel. Ernest Borgnine was in it. It’s about a country in South America where this guy forms a revolution in the hills and finally he comes down and takes over the palace and he’s holding a gun to the head of el presidente, who’s a corrupt son of a bitch but tells him, ‘Go ahead, shoot me and take this chair, because you will become what I am.’ I told Carlos that power corrupted people and he would eventually become the man he hated.”
But George had never stood up terribly well to an assault of Carlos’s revolutionary rhetoric, and as he’d done back at Danbury, he simply gave up protesting after a while and let the little Colombian keep the floor. “When a twenty-eight-year-old kid tells you he’s going to take over a country, what do you say to him? And I mean, what did I really care, anyway? I wanted one thing. I wanted the cocaine and I wanted the money. That’s all. Carlos’s scheme was forever, he was in for the whole show. I figured I wasn’t going to stay around long enough to see the last act.”
It wasn’t long after these conversations that George began getting the message, indistinct at first, that there were about to be some management shifts in the corporate structure of la compañía. It was nothing as dramatic as losing the corner office or executive dining-room privileges, yet he felt in all the transactions now going on between Miami and L.A. that in some way he was being left out of the loop. For one thing, by the end of the summer Carlos’s attention was clearly shifting from Miami to the islands. He still had to be in Miami occasionally, if only to deal with his own cash supply (a problem he solved by secreting the money inside the body panels of Chevy Blazers and shipped them down to his contacts in Medellín). But his main time these days was taken up with plans and negotiations in the Bahamas that seemed to require almost no consultation with George. For another, the coke George now took West was turning out to be second-class stuff, cut with quinine, the clumsiest of adulterating agents. Richard could no longer move the loads for top dollar, which meant he greeted George less enthusiastically, and sent him back with less take-home pay. When confronted about the deteriorating quality of the product, Carlos would tell George to wait for the next batch. But then that wouldn’t be much better. What was going on here? “I’d go out to L.A. with twenty-five or fifty kilos, and Richard would say it was cut and he didn’t have to take this shit, and I’d have to almost beg him. Then he’d say, ‘All right, I’ll take it,’ but like it was a big favor. And here we had been the best of friends. It didn’t take any genius to start thinking that he was getting stuff from some o
ther source and that I’d better make a move here or I was done dealing.”
George’s worries were put on hold for a few weeks when Barry Kane suddenly called to say he was finally ready to make the two runs, transporting 250 kilos each, back to back. He drove over to the Pavilion and picked up George and Carlos in his rangy four-door convertible Lincoln Continental, a vintage model from the early 1960s that had the doors opening out as on a cabinet and became a hit among oil sheikhs and Latin dictators. Carlos the car buff seemed very impressed. To discuss final plans, Barry drove them to the Castaways Motel in south Miami Beach, whose bar was constructed underneath a swimming pool to give an underwater view of all the women in their bikinis cavorting in the water like a school of guppies.
The delivery they were embarking on was a little more problematical than any they’d tried; before, George simply took the kilos out to someone he knew and handed the money over to the Colombians on his return. There was more cash involved here: The transportation fee for the two trips came to $5 million—$3 million for Kane and $1 million each for George and Carlos. More to the point, this was the first time they’d be dealing with Colombians they didn’t know personally, and also the first time the money and the cocaine would be brought together in the same place, a notoriously precarious situation in the drug business. When the money came in close proximity to the kilos, it seemed to raise the greed level of the Colombians to such irresistible heights—here was a chance to put their hands on the coke and all the money, double the profit—that the guns would come out from underneath the jackets, a lot of bodies left around for the police to sort out. In this particular instance, the likelihood of such a thing happening seemed pretty remote. After all, the coke belonged to people in Medellín who were using George’s group to fly it in to their own people in the States. The only thing they could recoup in a rip-off was the $5-million transportation cost. Since they needed Kane to keep flying, it was definitely not in their interest to take a short-term profit and lose the long-term asset. Still, you never knew. Some Colombian with a wild hair up his ass, a not-terribly-future-oriented guy, maybe hyped up on coke, might decide to make a play for the jackpot, just go ahead and grab it all, blow the people away and face the consequences later. Miami was still three years away from hitting its peak in the category of drug killings, which by 1980 were increasing at a fairly astounding rate. But there had been enough headlines in the newspaper to make George announce that he intended to bring along a gun, and he advised Kane to do the same.